


Pop

by OnnaStik



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Dermatillomania, Gen, Infection, Statement Fic, graphic content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-12-21 04:09:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21068600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnnaStik/pseuds/OnnaStik
Summary: Statement of Ellie Matheson, regarding her therapeutic use of a channel on YouTube.





	Pop

> _Statement of Ellie Matheson, regarding her therapeutic use of a channel on YouTube. Original statement given November 15, 2015. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London._
> 
> _Statement begins:_

First of all, it’s not a fetish. Not for me, anyway. I know there are people who watch them for that reason, I’m just not one of them. And I’m not trying to say I’m better than them, either, I just want us to be clear on why I was watching the videos.

See, I have this thing called excoriation disorder. Or dermatillomania, but I like “excoriation” better. Sounds less like, ooh, scary crazy person. Either way, what it means in my case is that I can never leave anything irregular on my skin, a pimple or a bug bite or any kind of scab, alone to heal to save my life. No matter how many times my mum and dad told me it wouldn’t get better if I picked it, I always had to open it up and hope whatever was in there making it so intolerable would be washed out by the blood.

I knew better once I grew up, of course. What made it so bad wasn’t in my skin. What I needed was some way to pick open my brain and let it bleed out of that.

It was an internet support forum that turned me on to popping videos. They don’t give quite the same satisfaction as squeezing the ooze out of your own skin, but they don’t give you scars either, and they can satisfy just enough of the urge sometimes to keep you from picking. So a lot of us watch them.

Probably the most respectable channel is Dr Pimple Popper, a real dermatologist who does everything responsibly, so she was who I watched at first. It was an educational channel, and despite the name, it’s not all pimples. I learned about epidermoid cysts, bits of skin turned inward so dead cells flake off under the surface and just macerate there. They come out in this grayish paste that I always imagined I could smell. And lipomas, benign tumors of fat that she'd squeeze out in one piece through as small a hole as possible. Sometimes you'd get a patient who’d just been letting the thing grow for months or years, to some absurd size, and I always boggled at their self-control not to have torn it open long ago. It was really just a lump to them, not something that consumed their thoughts.

But mostly it was the pimples and the abscesses I wanted to see, the sudden relief of expelling all that pent-up grease or pus. And all the careful preparation that dermatologists do doesn’t make for thrilling viewing- if you’ve seen one sequence of cleaning and numbing the area, you’ve seen all ten million of them- and they go slow and careful, so for the really fun ones, the _squirty_ ones, I mostly had to look elsewhere. There’s more of a popping subculture on YouTube than you’d think. Maybe it was irresponsible of me to give hits to the idiots who drain their own abscesses with a safety pin and film it, but it was what I needed to see.

That’s how I found popaholic4evr. She’s kind of... prolific. Must have the absolute worst luck with skin infections, assuming they’re all hers. I think they’re all hers. She talks while she’s lancing them, describing what she’s doing, though a lot of people in the comments swear she’s just voicing over someone else’s video. Not that I usually read YouTube comments, but I catch a few whenever I scroll down to make a comment of my own. She never replies to comments, even the ones that aren’t shitty, but she must read some of them because every time I’ve seen her comments section there’s at least one that’s hearted.

I don't usually subscribe to these things, but I did to her. They were that consistently good. Not in terms of video quality or anything, _that_ was even worse than most amateur phone recordings, but you could see enough, and the content was just perfect. At least once a month she'd show us a boil the size of my thumb, and they practically sprayed when she popped them. I could almost completely forget about the back acne I'd been trying and failing to leave alone, because it was so much better than any squeezing I'd ever be able to do.

About a month ago there was one that was just... absurd. Right over her collarbone and almost the size of a softball. I had no idea how a habitual popper, like she clearly was, had let something get so big in such an accessible place, but she had, and when the fluids flowed out like a creamy waterfall I realized what I'd been feeling ever since I found the channel.

The comment I left on that one was "is it weird that I'm kind of jealous?"

I don't think it _is_ weird. If you know someone's getting a kind of satisfaction you can never have, on a regular basis, of course you're going to be jealous of them, right? And she didn't mind. I know she didn't, because she hearted that comment just hours after I left it. I got the notification just before I headed to bed.

I don't usually remember my dreams. I didn't exactly remember these, either, I just remember the sense of _fullness_, and that's probably only because it felt so appropriate afterward. See, I woke up with a tender spot on my neck, and when I touched it something there was swollen and huge. No boil gets that big overnight, I should have been worried about a tumor or something, but I know what infection feels like. I wasn’t worried at all, and I didn’t even try any of the ways they tell you to try and make these things go down. I just got my needle and a paper towel and I popped it.

The pus flowed down my chest, more of it than I’d ever seen in one place. I wish I could describe the satisfaction, because it was so... profound. It was far beyond the physical. It was like finally opening up the skin of my mind and letting all that poisonous irritant come gushing out.

And it _is_ gone. I know, because when the boil came back a few days later I had no more need to get rid of it. I looked at it in a mirror and it was so right, a perfect little pocket of fluid full of life, and I knew that like any life in the body it would come out in its own good time.

I’ve looked after it. When the angry red rays appeared, I was happy to know that it would spread. The next one grew under my arm, where I can feel it whenever I move that arm, and I'm fine with it even now that it's grown past walnut size. I’m finally like those people who could go without picking and squeezing for years.

So I don’t need to watch the channel anymore, but I thought, if that’s what cured me somehow, someone should know about it, right? If it worked once, couldn’t it work again?

> _Statement ends._
> 
> _We've been unable to locate Ms. Matheson for follow-up. The phone number she gave has been disconnected, and after being dismissed from her job at a Pizza Express for "hygiene violations", she broke her lease at the listed address. No one claims to know where she might now be._
> 
> _We _have_ been able to find the Youtube channel of which she spoke- very easily, in fact. It's still quite active. I've decided against asking my assistants to watch any of the videos._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to @nonlegitatall for beta reading! Any surviving mistakes are entirely my own.


End file.
